Sometimes, I get so caught up in piping  fancy swirls of icing on cupcakes for aesthetic purposes, that I forget that there can be beauty in simplicity.

I have a dear friend named Jason. As with most of my dear friends, I have asked Jason from time to time if there is something in particular he would like for me to bake for him. He always says, "White cake, white icing." I never understood what the difference between vanilla cake and white cake would be, so I began seeking out white cake recipes in order to sort out the difference.  It quickly became apparent to me that there WAS a difference between white and vanilla cakes. But what was the best recipe for white cake? I found two that appealed to me, both of which are vegan (because I'm a really weird vegan-baking omnivore.  Let me rephrase: I'm not an omnivore who bakes vegans; I'm an omnivore who makes vegan baked goods. Glad I got that cleared up...)

I decided the best way to get to the bottom of the matter was to just to start testing these recipes. Seemed like a good excuse to make some mini-cakes and start some taste-testing (PURELY for research purposes, mind you...)

Test one: Vegan White Birthday Cake recipe

I know I make this cake look goooood, but it was not quite what I felt it should've been. I'm pretty good at being able to figure out what I do or don't like about a recipe and then tweaking the recipe to be more to my liking. I thought the flavor was good on this, but texture wasn't right, the batter was too thin, and it just didn't rise the way I thought it ought to.  I didn't eat half the cake and then take this picture; the layers were so thin that I had to slice each one into two semicirlces - yielding four layers. Yes, there are only three layers in the assembled cake...I had to do a taste test on the fourth semicircle! There were parts of this recipe that I felt were good, and which I knew I would keep in mind for future cakes.

Test two: Vegan White Cake recipe

If I had to use one phrase to describe this cake, it would be: old-fashioned. I hadn't realized what a difference using a solid fat in a cake, such as margarine or shortening, made in comparison with using oil in a cake. The texture of the cake brought to mind the types of cakes I'd have at my Mamaw Coley's house growing up. I'm guessing using butter or shortening in a cake is old-timey thing to do. As you can see, I didn't use white icing on this white cake. I KNOW how to make a good buttercream icing like the one I used on the first white cake recipe.  I thought I'd give my taste buds a little variety by using the chocolate icing recipe that was given with the recipe for this cake. The chocolate icing was old-fashioned style also. It uses oil rather than butter and shortening like buttercream-type recipes do. It yielded almost a fudge candy-like chocolate icing. So sugary that you feel it's teeth-shatteringly sweet, but yet you want to lick every last drop of the icing off the plate. The verdict for this cake recipe: passable, but not really what I was looking for. The old-fashioned style of it was dense and, while certainly tasty, just not what I like in a cake.

Trial Three: Vegan White Birthday Cake, redux

I decided there were aspects of the first recipe I tried that I really liked, and the fact that it didn't turn out right just seemed like a fluke to me. I tweaked this recipe just slightly the second time around, using tried-and-true cake making techniques that I felt would improve the outcome of the recipe. Boy, was I glad I gave this cake another shot! I was worried that I had made a mistake when I halved the original recipe size to make it fit the mini-cake, so I went whole hog and made the full-sized recipe this time. It baked up beauuuuuutifully. I did have to add more flour to the batter since it was still thinner than I thought it should be. I knew I had had cake overload already that week and COULDN'T be soley responsible for disposing of this whole cake. I said to myself "What am I gonna do with this ginourmous cake??" Thankfully, it was the day before Halloween and the perfect excuse to decorate the cake and take into work.

We have a winner folks! The texture was wonderful, the flavor was outstanding, and it baked up tall and proud. I now have a solid standard white cake recipe in my arsenal!

It's been awhile since I've done a Bokeh Wednesday, but here it goes:

Since I've had my Pentax K20D, I have really been missing the ability to do macro shots. For my Nikon D50 (my previous dSLR) and my Nikon film cameras, I have something called macro extension tubes to do close-up work. I mainly use this type of photography for my food photos, but it occasionally comes in handy in other areas as well. Essentially these extension tubes screw onto your lens, and create a distance between the film plane (or in the case of digital, the image sensor) and it causes the lens to focus more closely than normal (there is a more scientific explanation for this, but I am not well-versed in science or mathematics. Alls I know is that the tubes work!) You can stack tubes of different heights together to make your lens focus closer and closer - and it can get REAL close, folks, if you use more than one tube. I generally don't do this because it's just not my thang. However, macro tubes have really defined my food photography (there I go again, giving away my secrets...) I love 'em. Both my new Pentax-mount tubes and the ones I used on my Nikon bodies (which, incidentally, were designed for a whole nother lens mount called m42 which I have an adapter to make fit on Nikon, but that's another topic for another day) are manual focus, generic tubes. They're cheap as chips. I paid around $10 for the m42 tubes and abotu $12 for the new ones I just got for the Pentax.

I thought I should bake something to show off/test out the new tubes. I made pumpkin muffins. I even tried out my new snowflake silicone muffin "tin" (not really a tin since it's not metal, eh?) I sprinkled some powdered sugar on top to add interest for the photo. I say the new extension tubes work pretty well! This was taken with the shortest tube attached - I told you it'll get ridiculously close if you put on more than one. Look how close just the shortest one got us!

Of course, the more closely you focus on something, the more shallow the depth of field is going to be. That means with extension tubes, your depth of field is going to be WHOA shallow. You'd have to really close your aperture down to get much in focus. I don't want too much in focus, so I keep my aperture pretty wide for this stuff.

So that's it for this Bokeh Wednesday. Shallow depth of field AND pumpkin muffins? Mmmmm. Doesn't get much better than that!

You like my awesome pun I made in the blog title? I woke up yesterday to find that there was no cereal or other breakfast-appropriate food in my apartment. Rather than despair over this fact, I decided that when life hands you nothing for breakfast, you should make biscuits.

(Pentax K20D. Smc Pentax-a 50mm/2)

I have a dizzying array of photos and blogs that I am working  on for Shoot With Personality.  Tales of mystery and intrigue and magnicent adventures in the world of photography. Not really. I did attend Cooper-Young Fest recently and did some street-style photography, did a photo shoot for a musician I know, and I also acquired a "new to me" Polaroid-style instant camera, so blogs about those things (and more) are in the works.

This is probably my favorite cake I have ever made, cuteness-wise. I have meant to post it on SWP for a few weeks. I thought it would be appropriate to do so today, because it is Labor Day and apparently that means Americans can eat a lot.

It tasted delicious, too. I got the recipie from kittie a few years ago. She is the bomb and my cake-making idol.